I want to learn. I want to feel useful. I want to believe in the mission. I want to solve problems creatively. I want the people around me to recognize that my judgment carries weight.

For a while, I thought those were separate preferences.

I’m starting to think they’re much more connected than that.

Toward the end of my last job, I was comfortable in almost every conventional sense. I knew the domain. I knew the people. I knew how the organization worked. I had allies. I could do the job without expending nearly as many brain cells as I once had.

But I also felt increasingly empty.

Part of that was because I could no longer point to many areas where my involvement was truly consequential. Part of it was because creativity wasn’t particularly rewarded. And part of it was because the role itself was changing without anyone ever really saying how it was changing.

That ambiguity turned out to matter a lot.

If I tried to go deeper on something, perfect it, or push beyond the boundaries of my role, sometimes it created resentment. People understandably wondered whether I was taking something away from them.

At the same time, people above me could look at the same situation and wonder why I wasn’t doing more.

And I didn’t have a particularly good answer either. We had never established the equivalent of a data contract for the role.

What outcomes did I own?
Where did my authority begin and end?
How was the role changing?
What did “good” look like now—not two years ago?

When none of that is explicit, everyone starts inferring the schema from behavior. And people get defensive.

Looking back, the more important realization is not that I should have taken on more. It’s that I had reached a point where I didn’t want to take on anything materially important.

The perceived equation had become something like this:

Make the wrong consequential decision → potentially significant downside.
Make the right consequential decision → modest recognition, maybe.
Maintain the status quo → relatively safe.

That is not a recipe for courageous leadership.

And some of that responsibility belongs to me. At my level, nobody was going to hand me a perfectly written job description. I could have pushed harder to define my role. I could have initiated more uncomfortable conversations with partner teams. I could have proposed more ambitious work that wasn’t already on the roadmap.

But I also have to be honest about why I wasn’t doing those things anymore.

I had stopped believing the environment was safe enough to make the risk worthwhile.

That distinction matters to me now.

When I stop wanting meaningful ownership in the future, I need to ask myself quickly:

Have I outgrown the work, or have I stopped trusting the environment?

Those are very different problems.

Recognition

Recognition fits into this in a way I hadn’t fully understood before.
I like recognition. But I don’t actually care that much about awards or titles.
A public acknowledgment from someone I respect is often enough.

What matters is that other people can see Disha is trusted here. That gives me a sense of belonging. And that sense of belonging makes me want to push harder. It becomes a loop:

trust → belonging → confidence → greater investment → stronger contribution → more trust

Some of the moments I’m proudest of in my career worked exactly that way.

I once proposed a set of principles for a system we were building. Eventually, the team stopped needing me to repeat them. They started using the language themselves. They carried the ideas into conversations with their own teams and partners.

That felt more meaningful than any promotion could have.

My contribution had changed how the organization thought. That is recognition.

But there’s a catch.

When the work itself is exciting—when I’m learning, solving hard problems, watching a product improve, seeing a team grow—I barely need that external signal. The work tells me I matter.

Conversely, when the work becomes less meaningful, or the environment feels unsafe, recognition becomes much more salient.

It starts answering other questions:

Am I still trusted?
Do I still have standing here?
Does anyone see what I’m contributing?
Is it safe to keep investing myself in this place?

That can become a trap.

You can start seeking reassurance from the very system that is making you uncertain.

Which brings me to the best leadership environment I’ve experienced. One of my first bosses at Hulu was a leader I’ll call Sam Black. He was not perfect. None of us are. But over time, I watched him become someone I trusted enormously.

He owned his mistakes.
He took big swings.
He explained the why behind the things he wanted us to do.
He trusted me without constantly requiring me to prove that I deserved the trust.
He had conviction, but he could admit when he was wrong.
And when he changed his mind, he changed course.
Most importantly, he created a team where disagreement did not threaten belonging.

There were six of us on his staff at one point, and we could debate something for hours.
Really debate it.
Then we could go out to dinner afterward and have a great time.
We could disagree intensely behind closed doors and still present a coherent front to the broader organization once a decision was made.

That only works when everyone believes a few things:

✅ Disagreement will not be weaponized later.
✅ Losing an argument does not lower your standing.
✅ Changing your mind is allowed.
✅ The leader is not keeping score.
✅ And once the decision is made, the team moves together.

We could fight about the work without fighting about whether we belonged there.

That is psychological safety in a form I understand.

❌ Not endless consensus.
❌ Not avoiding conflict.
❌ Not lowering the bar.

Quite the opposite.

It is the ability to have hard conversations because the human relationship underneath them is secure.

Sam made courage rational.

I knew I could take a swing. I knew that if I was wrong, we would deal with the consequences and learn from them rather than search for someone to blame. And because of that, I was willing to take bigger swings.

I will always be loyal to him for that.

Which has made me realize something about loyalty too.

The healthiest loyalty I’ve felt in my career was never really loyalty to a company. It was loyalty to leaders who made me feel safe enough to be brave.

That’s what I’m trying to learn to recognize earlier now.

A job search reduces enormously complicated human relationships into filters: remote or hybrid, salary range, title, industry, tech stack.

None of those fields can capture what I’m actually trying to understand.

Does this place reward curiosity?
Can I disagree with the person I work for?
Do leaders admit mistakes?
Does initiative get interpreted as contribution or threat?
When something goes wrong, do people look for the lesson or the person to blame?
Do people here seem willing to follow their leaders because they trust them—or because the org chart says they have to?

Those are much harder questions to answer.

And I’m not looking for a perfect workplace.
I don’t think one exists.

I’m looking for a place where the problems, people, mission, expectations, and demands line up closely enough with who I am right now that I’m willing to invest myself.

💜 A place where taking ownership feels exciting instead of dangerous.
💜 A place where disagreement doesn’t threaten belonging.
💜 A place where I can take a real swing. And if I’m wrong, we learn from it.

That may be the clearest definition I have right now of where I want to belong.

The layoff exposed that more abruptly than I would have chosen.

The lesson isn’t that the previous nine years were wasted or that I need to start my career over. It’s that seniority does not eliminate the need to keep learning. In fact, the more senior I become, the more responsibility I have for creating my own growth when the environment stops creating it for me.

So this period isn’t about trying to become the engineer I was nine years ago. I’m rebuilding technical currency for the engineer and engineering leader I want to be next.

I’m coding again. I’m learning the infrastructure layers I previously led around but didn’t always operate myself. I’m learning how AI coding agents change the developer workflow, and separately learning how agentic systems are actually designed and built.

And I’m doing it by building something real rather than collecting courses and buzzwords.

The job search has also taught me something about how the market sees me. Anonymous applications rarely communicate the value of my background well. Conversations do. Nearly every meaningful opportunity I’ve had has come through another person.

So my strategy is becoming clearer: invest heavily in relationships, use the project to rebuild and demonstrate technical depth, and get better at translating nine years of leadership experience into the technical language the current market expects.

I don’t need to undo my career.

I need to update it.